The availability and ease of credit card systems have altered the way people pay for services, particularly vehicle-centric services. Transactions that used to require interaction with an attendant can now be performed without the aid of an attendant. By way of example, users can pay by credit card at a gasoline pump and/or at a parking establishment, reducing (e.g., to zero) the required interaction with an attendant and reducing the time it takes to complete the transaction.
Today, authorization and/or payment systems have advanced beyond credit card systems to further increase user convenience. By way of example, many toll roads provide frequent travelers with RFID tags that may be mounted to their vehicles. When a vehicle enters and/or exits the toll road, the RFID tag is detected and a user account associated with the RFID tag is billed. As such, the user may not be required to stop at a toll gate to collect a ticket and/or to manually pay a requisite fee. As another example, many parking establishments and/or parking authorities have developed payment applications for mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, etc.). When a user approaches a parking gate and/or parking meter, the mobile device may communicate with the parking gate and/or parking meter (e.g., via Bluetooth, infrared, etc.) to communicate an identity of the user and/or to communicate a user authorization to debit an account associated with the payment application, for example.
While these more advanced systems have proven useful, there are some drawbacks. For example, these authorization and/or payment systems are often highly fractured. As an example, an RFID tag provided by a first toll road authority may not be accepted by a second toll road authority. Therefore, if a user frequently travels on toll roads controlled by both the first and second toll road authorities, the user may be required to mount two RFID tags to his/her vehicle. Likewise, the payment applications developed by parking establishments and/or parking authorities are often not universal and/or not interoperable. Therefore, a user that frequents multiple garages may be required to install multiple applications, each of which requires its own user account. It may be appreciated that such lack of interoperability may be undesirable to a user because the user may be required to create multiple user accounts and may be required to know which establishment utilizes which application and/or RFID tag, for example.